The policies beyond Emancipation Proclamation which really helped end slavery

[xchrom]

http://www.salon.com/2014/05/26/it_wasnt_just_abraham_lincoln_the_policies_beyond_emancipation_proclamation_which_really_helped_end_slavery/



The men and women who struggled to abolish slavery were not counting on a war to get the job done. Of course they knew about military emancipation. Freeing slaves as a “military necessity” in wartime was an ancient practice, familiar to the histories of Greece and Rome, the African continent, Latin America and the United States. But abolitionists and antislavery politicians were not planning for a war so that the U.S. Army could sweep through the South emancipating as it went. If there was a war or rebellion, the federal government would certainly have the power to free slaves as a military necessity. But slavery’s opponents most often put their faith in an entirely different program designed to bring about the “ultimate extinction” of slavery. They would withdraw all federal support for slavery, surround the South with a “cordon of freedom,” pressuring the slave states to abolish the institution on their own. “Like a scorpion girt by fire,” antislavery activists argued, slavery would eventually sting itself to death. When the slave states seceded from the Union beginning in late 1860, they were not fleeing the prospect of military emancipation, they were hoping to avoid the scorpion’s sting.

By specifying exactly what slavery’s opponents hoped to accomplish we can see more clearly why none of the secession-winter proposals for sectional compromise succeeded in averting war. The second chapter does something similar, but from a different angle. It begins by clarifying the definition of slavery — which Americans understood to mean property rights in human beings—so that we can better understand what a debate over slavery might have looked like. This in turn makes it easier to see why disputes over seemingly marginal issues—slavery in the territories, fugitive slaves or abolition in Washington, D.C. — were always driven by an underlying conflict over the right versus the wrong of “property in man.” New World slavery was also “racial” in that it restricted enslavement to sub-Saharan Africans and their descendants, a broad constellation of human beings widely supposed to constitute a distinct “race.” This made it impossible to argue about slavery without arguing about racial equality. Chapter three recovers that argument. Together these three chapters highlight the depth and significance of the Republican Party’s threat to slavery on the eve of the Civil War.

That threat did not include military emancipation, at least not before the secession crisis. By surveying the long history of military emancipation in the United States, chapter four demonstrates that freeing slaves in wartime was a mainstream idea whose origins lay well outside the abolitionist movement. This last point requires some elaboration.

The Emancipation Proclamation occupies center stage in most accounts of slavery’s destruction. It’s easy to see why. Issued on January 1, 1863, at the midpoint of the Civil War, the proclamation provides a convenient climax to a large and dramatic story. It transformed the nature of the war. It altered Union policy on the ground in the southern states. It was an attempt to use military emancipation not simply as a weapon of war but as a means of destroying slavery. Although military emancipation had been commonplace in human history, including American history, it was not at all common to proclaim all slaves free as a military necessity. It’s no wonder we spend so much time thinking about Lincoln’s proclamation.